Vancouver Island University

Through the Community Scholars Program, staff and volunteers in BC-based community organizations have unprecedented access to paywalled academic content from participating publishers, together with supporting services of librarians. In this session we reflect on how the Program supports non-profit organizations that promote inclusion and make measurable contributions to social and economic wellbeing, fostering healthy and resilient communities across Vancouver Island and BC. We explore how this occurs through providing access to paywalled academic content, and also through supporting communities of practice, and offering expert advice and services related to scholarly information.

This presentation will discuss the successes, challenges, and lessons learned from hosting VIU Library’s first Long Night Against Procrastination (LNAP). Our objective was to help students get through final assignments. We achieved this by remaining open after hours and inviting academic services and student supports into the Commons until midnight. This was done in recognition that many students may not be able to seek the help they need during regular hours. Participants will leave knowing how to host their own LNAP and herd the necessary cats to make it happen.

VIU Library has been working on a project to create meaningful ways for users to interact with a unique collection of audio interviews about Nanaimo’s coal mining past. To map the spoken word of coal miners and their families, tech services staff searched through interview transcripts for references to mines and then took steps to represent these mentions of historic sites on an interactive map. Not only did the project provide opportunities for us to venture “into the darkness” of increasingly technical new work, but it also helped to bring light to the stories of generations of local coal miners.
At VILSC in 2016, Dalys and Sarah were part of a crack team of VIU Library wizards presenting a "6-pack" of emerging work projects that developed new skills in our department. The coal mines map, then in its early days, was one of the projects featured. Three years later, we’re still adding the finishing touches, but we’ve learned a lot, and we’d like to share our experience.

Surfacing collections across Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) allows us to tell stories and share otherwise obscure specimens, artifacts, or records. A BC Digital Library has transformative potential to show complexity of people and places, amplify local collections, and to make our past available to help shape social discourse. But it must be built, and maintained into the future. A growing group of GLAM institutions are finding ways to get it done through radical collaboration. Join panelists for tales of prototyping across sectors, looming questions of metadata, and results of a pulse check on how the GLAM sector can collaborate.

Surfacing collections across Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) allows us to tell stories and share otherwise obscure specimens, artifacts, or records. A BC Digital Library has transformative potential to show complexity of people and places, amplify local collections, and to make our past available to help shape social discourse. But it must be built, and maintained into the future. A growing group of GLAM institutions are finding ways to get it done through radical collaboration. Join panelists for tales of prototyping across sectors, looming questions of metadata, and results of a pulse check on how the GLAM sector can collaborate.